But the idea that parents would try to buy their way into elite universities wasn’t surprising, said former Ivy League admissions officers and college counselors across the country.

Money has always mattered in the college admissions process, though these parents took it to a whole new and illegal level, said Casey Near, executive director of counseling at Collegewise, which provides a range of services to applicants.

“I think we, working in this industry, understand that admissions is not a meritocracy,” she said. “Once you understand that’s true, this (scandal) becomes less surprising.”

Families with means have always been able to game the system, paying for tutors, college essay consultants, the best private schools, overseas community service stints and multiple attempts at the SAT test to raise scores, experts said.

The ultra-rich have an additional advantage in their ability to donate large sums of money to universities, which can boost their kids’ chances of acceptance, said Maria Laskaris, former dean of admissions at Dartmouth College and now senior admissions counselor at Top Tier Admissions.

“It’s not a guarantee of admissions for sure, but it is certainly something you’re made aware of,” she said. “Colleges are always in fundraising mode.”

Ironically, the families caught up in the scandal likely already had an edge, including wealth, name recognition or both.

“They’re already at a level where they have a lot of advantages, so it was surprising they would go that extra step,” Laskaris said. “They already have the name recognition, the kind of income and maybe charitable record that would get someone to look at them differently.”

That parents would resort to bribery and cheating, however, exemplify how crazy and stressful the admission process has become, said Megan Dorsey, founder of College Prep Results.

Students are applying to 12, 15 or 20 colleges, Dorsey said, and even the best students face slim odds of getting into the elite universities like Harvard, Yale or Stanford.

The desire to get into a top university becomes an obsession for some, a personal statement of value and prestige.

“I think an Ivy League degree has become kind of the ultra super car,” said Joel Butterly, chief executive of Ingenius Prep. “It is the prestige of having gone there.”

At the same time, top universities are looking to broaden the diversity of students who attend, so while money does matter in some cases, passion and drive are what admissions officers are looking for, Laskaris said.

“You look for students who have truly distinguished themselves relative to the opportunities and resources they’ve had available to them,” she said.

That said, test scores and grades also matter.

The parents charged in the scandal could have played by the rules to try to get their kids into Yale or the University of Southern California, ensuring they had the best education, the most opportunities, the most expensive tutors and college consultants to write those essays about hardships overcome, but decided they needed an even greater edge, Dorsey said.

“That is what it says about the state of college admissions right now,” she said. “Even what you can buy as an ultra-wealthy person still doesn’t feel like enough.”

While bribery and cheating are still relatively rare, it’s clear families want that edge in the college admissions process, Butterly said.

Take the family in Hong Kong that paid an admissions consultant $2 million to get their kids into an Ivy League school, then sued in 2012 when the two boys didn’t get into Harvard.

In other words, families are eager to buy their way into a top-notch college, through the front door or the back.

“It would be ridiculous to say that money does not matter in admissions,” Butterly said. “It matters in every form of social mobility in the United States.”

Jill Tucker has covered education in California for 22 years, writing stories that range from issues facing Bay Area school districts to broader national policy debates. Her work has generated changes to state law and spurred political and community action to address local needs.

She is a frequent guest on KQED’s “Newroom" television show and "Forum" radio show. A Bay Area native, Jill earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a bachelor’s degree from the UC Santa Barbara. In between, she spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Cape Verde, West Africa.